Tagged: google shopping seo

In the news today we see one of the largest public attacks on Google from failing search engine Bing. Although Bing is a great search engine it’s always going to be difficult for Microsoft to take on the search engine giant. But their recent public slag off that Google Shopping has been corrupted by paid for results is a pretty big one.

Scroogled or not by Google Shopping?

In the beginning, Google preached, “Don’t be evil“—but that changed on May 31, 2012. That’s when Google Shopping announced a new initiative. Simply put, all of their shopping results are now paid ads.

In their under-the-radar announcement, Google admits they’ve now built “a purely commercial model” that delivers listings ranked by “bid price.” Google Shopping is nothing more than a list of targeted ads that unsuspecting customers assume are search results. They call these “Product Listing Ads” a “truly great search.”

We say that when you limit choices and rank them by payment, consumers get Scroogled. For an honest search.

The truth about Scroogle and Google Shopping paid ads

Yes Google announced in May 2012 that U.S shopping feeds would not be shown within the search results unless you paid for it. That was always going to happen, I don’t think it’s a good thing for the user but for Google, hell wouldn’t you? I prefer the old way it was organic, and honest results. If I wanted to get you to find my diet drug I could now simply pay for it to appear in any low grate, low competitive category for $100 per month. So there are some pretty obvious downsides and things that should be monitored to prevent this kind of misuse.

But this new paid for ad ruling is only in the U.S

Free Google Shopping listings in the U.K

We have thousands of live product items that we optimize our clients for, who are appearing on the first page right now. We can’t disclose this on our blog but if you get in touch we’ll give you more details and live examples.

Media Spin

The media has put a completely onesided spin on this story, it’s not always as black and white as you think.

After thought

I do feel this new direction Google have taken will continue to manifest in to other areas and countries. Whether it works or not is another thing, and whether they keep to this new format well, only time will tell.

For UK businesses wanting to monetize from Google Shopping, what are you waiting for? Do it before you have to pay per click.

If your business sells products online, be it in the physical or digital sense then are you missing out on one of the greatest most unused SEO tools within your arsenal?

Google Merchant Centre Optimization

That’s right Google have even created a dedicated place for any business to sell their products online. The best part about it’s free to all.

For pretty much any product search, Google will present the user with 3 product options currently for sale right now. They’ve also included a tab at the top of the results (and the left) called ‘Shopping’ and when you click that you are presented with all of the products it has in it’s database.

How do I get my products listing in Google Merchant Centre/Google Shopping?

That’s the tricky part, you’re going to need to understand XML feeds, and read through all of Google’s guidelines before you can upload your list. If you do this incorrectly you feed will not be indexed within the Google Shopping results.

Let us handle the techno trickery for you

For a nominal fee not only can we create your XML feed for Google Shopping but even optimize it to make sure it features within the first page results.